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Our credit card processing industry has some great people, true highly knowledgeable and experienced professionals. Unfortunately there are also those that need to be weeded out as well. We as professionals must be vigilant in always putting the customer first. At Capital Bankcard our customers are the reason we are in business. Full disclosure with no “smoke and mirrors” or “catch me if you can” mentality is the only acceptable business practice. We must consistently conduct business at the highest ethical standards at all times under all marketing conditions regardless of unscrupulous practices of competitors.

We must also be just as vigilant in cleaning up and maintaining our industries’ image. It all starts within ourselves. Give yourself the mirror test daily. Look in the mirror and ask yourself, “am I conducting business at the highest ethical standards with my customers best interests first and foremost or am I just trying to line my own pockets at everyone else’s expense? Am I improving our industry image or am I part of the problem? We all know where we stand when staring at ourselves in that mirror.

To the true ethical professionals, I am honored to be your peer! To those who don’t fall in this category, find a new industry before our industry finds you! It’s time for all industry professionals to help clean up our industry starting with ourselves.

This article below is an example of those who should have found a new industry:

Wells Fargo has reportedly overhauled the credit card processing business due to an internal inquiry that found some of its employees were falsely reporting customers’ sales and steered small businesses into contracts that were expensive and confusing.

According to a report in The Wall Street Journal citing unnamed current managers, Wells Fargo has fired two dozen or more employees of Wells Fargo Merchant Services during the course of the past two years because of those practices and other violations of the bank’s policies. The WSJ noted the practices that harmed small business customers wasn’t previously made public. The WSJ reported that Wells Fargo discovered the new abuses after delving into a broad inquiry into the practices of the bank given the fake accounting scandal last year. Wells Fargo told the WSJ in a statement that the bank has taken “significant steps” to improve Wells Fargo Merchant Services, its merchant-processing unit for credit- and debit-card payments. While merchant processing isn’t a sexy business, a lot of small business owners told the WSJ that high-pressure sales tactics are common in the industry, as are complex pricing structures and expensive early termination fee that lock customers into contracts.

Citing the Nilson Report, the WSJ noted that merchant processors earned $18.15 billion in debit and credit card fees last year. Wells Fargo, JPMorgan Chase and Bank of America are among the largest players in that area. In February Wells Fargo announced it has overhauled its Payments, Virtual Solutions and Innovation Group, with the new structure focused on enhancing the unit’s efforts in the payments market. In a press release, Wells Fargo said it is focusing on payments, artificial intelligence and application programming interfaces (APIs) to help increase its payments efforts and speed up opportunities with corporate banking customers. Wells Fargo said the investments in each area will help the company create digital banking products and make it easier for customers to achieve their financial goals.